New Book Asks: Sovereignty or Submission?

In his new book, Sovereignty or Submission, John Fonte identifies globalism as the latest evolutionary iteration of the “multiculturalism-diversity” that once infatuated the American elites.

Just as they once promoted ethnic-racial-gender group consciousness as the antidote for all the ills associated with following the path of freedom and individual rights as set out by our Founding Fathers, the elites now proffer transnationalism and “global citizenship” as the newest cure-all.

Fonte rightly recognizes both movements as antithetical to the core American concepts of republicanism and individual liberty.

By 2009, Fonte writes, the world’s leading political actors were pounding a constant drumbeat of “global problems require global solutions.” Today, there are forces within and without the government of the United States that willingly dance to the globalist tune and genuinely believe that there is greater good in the enforcement of global laws and the establishment of a single world government than in the fostering of the timeless principles of freedom incorporated in the U.S. Constitution.

John Fonte is a senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at Hudson Institute. The center provides analysis and policy advice on civic education, citizenship, and issues concerning the interplay of national identity, the assimilation of immigrants, and global organizations.

Prior to joining the Hudson Institute, Dr. Fonte was a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he directed the Committee to Review National Standards chaired by Lynne V. Cheney. He also served as a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Education and a program administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He is currently on the Board of the American Council for Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

In describing the thesis of his book, Dr. Fonte insists that it “is a moral and intellectual defense of democratic, or what I call ‘Philadelphian’ sovereignty.” Philadelphia was, of course, the site of the crafting of two of our nation’s most critical expositions of independence, liberty, and republican self-government: the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution 11 years later.

One of the most prominent of the globalist organizations opposing the perpetuation of America’s constitutional freedom is the United Nations. While there is little room to argue the damage done by the UN to the continued self-determination of the United States, Fonte asserts that the real threat comes not from the UN itself, but from those within the United States who doggedly demand adherence to its resolutions, regardless of constitutional mandates to the contrary.

Fonte explained his point in an interview:

It is important to emphasize that the main threat to American sovereignty comes, not from the UN or other international institutions, but from American globalists themselves. The UN and international law per se, can not force us to do anything, but many, among our elites, are promoting American subordination to global authority.

I’ll give you a few examples. Leading American "human rights" groups including Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Arab-American Institute, La Raza, Mexican American Legal and Education Foundation (MALDEF) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights have called for the United States to accept all UN human rights treaties without any reservations (including First Amendment, Second Amendment and Tenth Amendment, i.e., federalism, restrictions on international law). This would effectively subordinate the American constitution to UN-made "global rules." The "global rules" these American human rights groups demand include: racial and gender preference quotas in all aspects of public and private life; official multilingualism; the ending of any serious border enforcement; the abolition of capital punishment; the payment of U.S. reparations for slavery; and much more.

Despite a similarity in the ultimate aims of those groups, Fonte argues that globalism is not a monolithic movement. Within the greater globalist universe there are two poles of groups around which adherents orbit:

The first are the ideological leftists ... whose argument is simply that the broad leftist agenda represents real substantive rights (equality of result), as opposed to the individual rights of a capitalist democracy.

The second group of American globalists are often foreign policy specialists who believe that America is in decline. This group of globalists argue in Orwellian fashion that the United States should exercise “leadership” and “engagement” by promoting a new global governance system over national sovereignty. They maintain, unrealistically, that if Americans agree to limit their own sovereignty and submit to global rules, the Chinese will be persuaded to do the same, thus "protecting American interests" in the future as China becomes stronger. This reveals the global governance project to be both naïve and dangerously suicidal, placing American security in the hands of an untested and unaccountable global system.

In so many ways, it seems that the obliteration of the 10th Amendment specifically and federalism in general is one of the most potent arms in the globalist arsenal. By subordinating the states to the power on the Potomac, globalists rightly reason that the international laws, statutes, standards, and practices that they earnestly espouse could erode more quickly the bedrock principles of liberty upon which the states individually are built. That is to say, one ostensibly republican government is more easily conquered than 50 sovereign states.

There is another favorite tactic employed by the globalist strategists: placing legislative power in the hands of international bodies who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. International courts, multinational armed forces, and global parliaments will, if the globalist agenda is accomplished, supplant the corresponding institutions established by the federal or state constitutions.

Fonte said:

Global governance is not consist[ent] with American democratic principles. Our highest political principles rest on the maintenance of our constitutional self-government. How is ceding democratic decision making to non-citizens in supranational bodies outside of the American constitutional process consistent with our principles and values? The argument is an oxymoron.

In Federalist No. seven, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Divide et impera [divide and conquer] must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.” The anti-American globalists have reckoned that the fall of the United States is facilitated by the fall of other formerly self-governing nations. In Europe, the plan is working. Fonte points to Europe as a cautionary tale:

Over the past sixty years the European Union has slowly evolved into a post-national, post-democratic, and post-liberal type of regime. Power has shifted from national parliaments (e.g., British House of Commons) in democratic nation-states to unaccountable bureaucratic institutions in Brussels. The EU Deputy Ambassador to Washington told me that 60-80 percent of European laws today are initiated in Brussels.

How long until there is the same ratio to laws applicable to the citizens of the United States? Dr. Fonte predicts that the speed of the permeation of the globalist ideology into the groundwater of American self-determination will determine the pace of the withering of the tree of liberty planted so long ago by our Founding Fathers.

Americans are blessed in that time yet remains for us to resist the subjugation of our military to multinational commanders, to resist the surrendering of the legislative power to supranational congresses populated with lawmakers unaccountable to the American people, to resist the eradication of state sovereignty and the protection of republican government provided thereby, and finally to resist the chronic disregard of constitutional principles on the part of our elected leaders.

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